\ I 41 ' fIJ'. I J THE NEW YOR.KER. up and down the street were now dou- bling every six months. He moved his store to a cubbyhole on Market Street, and the space he vacated was quickly occupied by a boutique selling Water- ford crystal. The Castro was no longer poor, and in a sense it was no longer a neighbor- hood. Milk had railed against the city's spending money on making San Francisco a tourist center, but now the Castro had become a mecca (as jour- nalists put it) for gay tourists. The air shuttle between Los Angeles and San Francisco was now nick- named the Gay Express, for every Friday night it was filled with gay Angelenos coming to town for the weekend. N ew Yorkers, Chicagoans, and others would spend their vacations in San Francisco, staying at gay hotels, going to gay restaurants, and shopping at gay stores. In the summertime, you could near the accents of New York and Houston on the streets of the Cas- tro, and also of London, Paris, and Sydney. Then, too, with many of those who came as tourists returning to settle, the Castro was becoming the hub of a vast redevelopment project. Gay men-and some gay women- were moving into N oe Valley and the Mission district; they were moving into the Haight-Fillmore district and settling the back slopes of Pacific Heig h ts, painting and refurbishing as they went. In some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, Victorian façades blossomed with decorator paint. Harvey Milk, the populist, spoke of gay people as an oppressed minority and promised to make common cause with the racial-minority groups in the city and with the poor. But the gay immigrants were now calling this alli- ance in question. They might be refu- gees from oppression, but they were also, by and large, young white men who had arrived in town at the very moment for beginning their careers. In practice, they were taking profes- sional and managerial jobs, or they were staffing the numerous new ser- vice industries, or they were starting businesses of their own. In many ways, they were proving a boon to the city. By pioneering the dilapidated neigh- borhoods, they were helping to reverse the white and middle-class flight to the suburbs, thus increasing the tax base both directly and indirectly. Since they had no children, they made no demands on the schools, and they had more income than the average family man or woman to spend both on enter- tainment and on housing. They were supporting the opera, the ballet, and other cultural institutions of the city. But in settling the poor neighborhoods they were pushing real-estate prices up and pushing black and Hispanic fam- ilies out. This was not, of course, their aim. Jim Rivaldo was one of the early set- tlers of the Haight-Fillmore, and when he arrived there, in 1972, the main street was a combat zone of al- coholics, drug dealers, and thugs. He set up a neighborhood as- sociation to make the area livable for black and white residents. Under his leader- ship, the association brought in the police, demanded efficient city services, and began to reverse the process of decay and dereliction in the area. Many black residents applauded his efforts, but, as one black social worker pointed out, the alcoholics and the drug dealers were the people who had been keeping the rents down. The safer the streets were, the more attrac- tive they became to white settlers and real-estate developers, and the larger the number of black families that were pushed out-including the poorest families, with nowhere else to go. The logic was inescapable. Rivaldo under- stood it; he was defensi ve on tha t score. What he wanted was what Har- vey Milk had wanted some years be- fore in the Castro-to maintain an integrated neighborhood. But he could not insure it any better than Milk had, and for many gay settlers it was simply not a priority. And while Milk wor- ried about gentrification, he predIcted with some relish that an alliance of gay and Asian immigrants would con- trol the city in a few years. It was, Shilts wrote, a time of gay manifest destiny. The new Castro and all that it stood for set off a debate within the gay community-a debate whose terms were quintessentially Californian. One side of that debate was represented by the financier David Goodstein, who was now the publisher of the A dvo- cate, a biweekly newspaper and the best-selling gay publication in the country. Published out of plush offices in San Mateo, the Advocate combined political and cultural journalism with photographs of beautiful semi-naked men and ads for gay baths, skin flicks, and hustlers. 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